Google and Bing have moved far beyond algorithms that positively reward a keyword appearing multiple times in the URL string. Don’t hurt your chances of earning a click (which CAN impact your rankings) by overdoing keyword matching/repetition in your URLs. What SMEs haven’t realised yet, is the fact that users are changing their user search behaviour in search engines (when they perform a query) on their mobiles or tablets. Monitor the keywords, the site’s stats, the levels of engagement on each topic and find what users really expect from your page. Enter competitor’s domain on SimilarWeb.com to see where their visitors are coming from, which social networks they use and see what’s interesting for that audience.

It's not guaranteed that your meta description is always pulled into SERPs as it once was

At the top of any page, type the phrase “search engines” into your Search Bar to attain access to several different internet sites that specifically aid in searching. WordPress is one of the best-loved platforms out there because it’s really intuitive and can be integrated into a custom CMS. Plus, it has plenty of handy plugins to help with blog optimisation, such as Yoast, which assesses the SEO-friendliness of a blog post and gives you actionable advice on how to improve it. Another important factor is the way that the sites link to you, sites that use the rel=nofollow tag to link to you or sites that use a redirect to link to you will not help you, also the search engines look at the text that links to you. The first thing you need to do is figure out who your ideal customer is. Think about where they are and the problems they are facing. What questions do they have that need answers? Once you have a clear picture of their issues in your mind, you should tailor your content to them.

Avoid unrelated directories and low quality guest-posts

Integrate your official website with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest. People who visit your site will share your content on their social media profiles and help build your brand awareness. In today’s SEO, high-quality and relevant backlinks have the most value.

But how do you build good backlinks?! SEO can be difficult to understand and due to its ever changing nature, it can feel like a chore to keep up. For some businesses a point in the right direction is all that is needed, for others that have had an audit carried out they may just need keeping on-track. Dependant on your requirements this can range from analysis of your site and advice given over the telephone to a visit to your premises and coaching given directly to your in-house team.

Getting websites found on search engines

Canonicalizing URLs is a very important aspect of Search Engine Optimization but also of Social Media Marketing. Page load speed is also a ranking factor, especially for mobile. Search engines are very clever in reading every little detail about your web page in order to rank all the sites that they store. It is advisable therefore to get some structure in your website files, rather than having them all loose in one huge folder. We asked an SEO Specialist, Gaz Hall, for his thoughts on the matter: "SEO and SEM tactics are not disappearing any time soon, so why not use them to your advantage? There are a lot of people using search engines to look for what you have to offer, and in the area you are offering them in."

Useful, high quality, relevant content

Your online competitors may not be who you think! By taking a broad look at your sector from an online perspective will help uncover potential opportunities that you are missing out on. Try to ensure the key phrase is an exact match to what the searcher will type into a search engine. This means phrasing your keywords in a conversational fashion if you want to optimize for natural language search queries With all the signals in the Google algorithm – and there are hundreds of them – why would links still be so valuable as a signal? People like to seem smart and cool in front of others. Try to create content that makes people feel this way. Make them feel they’re ‘insiders’.